


The Postscript

by RidiculousMavis



Category: Night Watch - Sarah Waters
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-22
Updated: 2017-12-22
Packaged: 2019-02-17 11:50:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13076265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RidiculousMavis/pseuds/RidiculousMavis
Summary: Kay comes to a decision about her future. Attempted in the style of Radclyffe Hall.





	The Postscript

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Miss M (missm)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/missm/gifts).



> For Miss M, whose Yuletide prompts finally gave me the kick I needed to finish The Well of Loneliness. Then this happened.

Kay wandered those desolate streets of London. With long legs she strode through the world, hoping to tire her body as much as her mind so that she might sleep through the cold nights. 

The Langrish family fortune she had teased herself regarding, a self deprecation born of indecision and a nagging sense of ill desert, did not offer the comfort it might have offered a person who had known discomfort in precarious arrangements. Kay had ever been comfortable, the precise extra degrees of comfort were hard to measure. 

Instead, this comfort became suffocating, as under a heavy quilt or a fireplace too blazing and oppressive. What Kay needed was work and yet she was in no need of money to press her into some sort of employment. 

Lacking this imperative she was wont to wallow in self pity during those long walks around the city. She who could be so gentle with others, so painstakingly understanding - when that pity was turned inward it became her undoing. 

Nor was she so short on talent that this channeled her into any particular endeavour. Any joy she might have found in an undertaking had been snuffed out - there was little joy in her life. Each opportunity seemed to have impossible barriers against it. 

She might write - claimed already by Julia. She might help rebuild this city - claimed already previously by Julia. She might drive the ambulances - claimed once more by the men and the tradition everyone had slipped so easily back into in peacetime. 

Still more perfectly reasonable options she dismissed unreasonably for one reason or another. Excepting the real reason, which was that she simply did not want to. 

She could invest some of that fortune and open a charming little book shop where she could pass her time in dusty seclusion. She would not need customers to sustain her but perhaps they would come anyway. She could help them choose books that would give them pleasure - an honourable thing. But to sit all day in a shop, alone, was not so different from how she spent her days now other than that she would not be able to pick up and leave when the mood struck her. 

At times she was filled with a vigour for a simple, honest, physical work. Like Mickey, at her filling station. Mickey’s choices had been easily narrowed by the expediency of needing money and a desire to live unfettered in trousers. 

But Kay would not work in a filling station. Her clipped tones, her bearing, gave her too much away and would raise eyebrows. She had money and could wear her trousers without needing the fumes, the cold, the chilblains. 

And so she paced and coming across the road by the park passed two busses pulled over. Stood together by their side were a corresponding pair of women liveried in the navy with red trim of the bus company and huddled around a cigarette. One wore a skirt but the other was in neatly pressed trousers. 

They looked up as she moved round them and Kay nodded out of some new deep respect. 

At the second bus she craned her neck to see into the cab - she was not given to taking the bus herself - and observed the imposing large, flat steering wheel and the neat dashboard and thought, “What a magnificent beast is a bus,” and how fine it would be to trundle these familiar streets of London with such power and a precious cargo of Life.


End file.
